The guys behind the R-rated holiday shoot-’em-up still sound incredulous — not only that their movie overperformed but that it reached the screen at all. Photo: Allen Fraser/Universal Studios
Santa Claus bashing a man’s skull in with a sledgehammer. A drunken St. Nick projectile vomiting from his sleigh. Kris Kringle impaling a paramilitary mercenary on an icicle like a giant frozen shish kebab, then unceremoniously feeding another would-be Claus killer through the whirling blades of a snow blower with a hearty “Ho, ho, ho!” This is the creative content — as showcased within the R-rated holiday shoot-’em-up Violent Night — for which audiences showed up in surprising numbers over an otherwise dead movie-release corridor. This past weekend, facing no other new movies in wide release, the lower-budget genre title (starring David Harbour as a dissolute, disillusioned Father Christmas and produced by John Wick co-director David Leitch) overperformed prerelease “tracking” estimates, pulling in $13.3 million in its opening three days in around 3,500 North American theaters.
The Universal-distributed yuletide rollick, which cost $20 million to produce, failed to topple Black Panther: Wakanda Forever from the top spot at the box office (in its fourth weekend, the Marvel sequel took in $17.6 million, bringing its cumulative gross to $393 million worldwide). But with a surprisingly high B+ CinemaScore, Violent Night surpassed financial expectations by more than $3 million and appears set to sell somewhere between $40 million and $50 million of tickets over its multiplex run. That’s a heartening bellwether of overall audience engagement for the beleaguered movie-exhibition industry and the latest in a recent line of cinematic gorefests (including Smile, Terrifier 2 and Barbarian) to establish the arch theatricality of arterial splatter in a post-COVID filmgoing era.
The idea of a Santa who hands out seasons beatings to heavily armed bad guys on his naughty list may be irresistible to the all-important males-over-25 demographic — Violent Night’s core constituency to date — but the movie’s long and haphazard path to the screen was hardly a foregone conclusion. Although Violent Night might at first seem to follow in the now-rich tradition of Christmas horror established by such exemplars as Krampus, Jack Frost, and the Silent Night, Deadly Night franchise, it initially took form as a parody: what screenwriters Pat Casey and Josh Miller disparagingly refer to as “that Die Hard Santa thing.”
Friends since high school, Miller and Casey first tested the premise in their suburban Minnesota hometown, filming an homage to the 1988 Bruce Willis action classic (which is set during Christmas) that aired on a local cable-access show. “It featured Santa rescuing everyone at the TV station when the TV station got taken over by terrorists,” Miller recalls to Vulture.
Over the intervening years, the writing duo racked up credits on the Fox animated series Golan the Insatiable and the Blumhouse Television title Into the Dark along with writing and producing several of their own shorts. But they never entirely abandoned the notion of a badass Kris Kringle. “Every few years, we’d be like, ‘Maybe we could do that Die Hard Santa thing as a real movie,’” Casey says. Adds Miller: “At one point, we were like, ‘Is there a way to just make this ourselves for $30,000, Kevin Smith style?’ We usually didn’t even tell people about the idea. We didn’t think a regular production company would like it, let alone a major Hollywood studio. It was preposterous that anyone with money would think this was a good idea.”
Flash forward to the winter of 2019, just ahead of the release of Paramount’s $90 million adaptation of Sonic the Hedgehog — Casey and Miller’s biggest-budget and most mainstream screenwriting gig up until that time. “We got together with our agents and sort of ran them through a list of ‘Here’s some ideas we could take out as a pitch.’ And Violent Night was at the bottom of that,” says Casey. “It wasn’t even on the list. It was an honorable mention.”
Their agents, however, couldn’t stop laughing and immediately began talking up the pair’s proposal around Hollywood. The next day came good news: Executives at 87 North, the action-oriented production company now known for such films as Bullet Train and Nobody — and headed by Leitch, the action-choreography doyen responsible for stunt-heavy hits such as Deadpool 2 and Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw — was interested in developing a script around the idea, which led to Universal getting onboard. “We were kind of shocked because we always thought the idea was so stupid,” Casey remembers. “But, as it turned out, maybe it was just stupid enough because David was loving everything about it.”
Casey and Miller rescaled their original pitch to accommodate 87 North’s strengths: an abundance of hand-to-hand fighting and “improvised, Jackie Chan–type of weapons.” But, more important, the writers stuck to the mandate of penning a yuletide movie specifically for people who don’t enjoy the holiday — even while crafting scenes of unabashed sentimentality that remain of a piece with the “Peace on Earth, goodwill to all men” spirit of the season. “Pat and I were like, ‘Why can’t we have a super-gory R-rated movie for people who do like Christmas movies?’ And what makes it more Christmasy than having the actual Santa and just playing into all the conventions and tropes that we expect from a good Santa movie?” says Miller.
Adds Casey: “We feel like it’s almost more subversive to embrace the gooey heart of Christmas than to be only ironic and crap all over it.”
Contrary to the type of studio meddling that can creatively derail so much of modern Hollywood’s original IP, Matt Riley, Universal’s executive vice-president of production, had precisely two notes for the writers: any depiction of the North Pole would be prohibitively expensive, and “Just go nuts” with the action. In turn, Miller and Casey leaned into an unexpected yet plausible explanation for Santa’s history of violence. “That’s such a big part of the kind of one-man-army movies like Die Hard itself,” Miller says. “In Die Hard, you know he is a cop the whole time. But in many of these movies, the bad guys learn Steven Seagal was not just a cook in Under Siege, he was an ex–Navy SEAL! So we were like, ‘What is Santa’s backstory that makes him so tough? What would have made him venture up to the North Pole?”
The writers still sound somewhat incredulous not only that Violent Night has connected with audiences but that it reached the screen at all. “We couldn’t believe that people were so into this idea at every turn!” Miller exclaims. “The object of this movie was always just to be a fun time,” continues Casey. “And Universal execs didn’t make us water it down. They really embraced everything this movie could be.”
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